Carceral Counterpublics: Transmedial Resistance of the Political Dissident in Postcolonial Indian Democracy
In the neoliberal state order, alongside legal constraints, every public sphere is placed under surveillance through the rhetoric of security. This biopolitical management has been intensified by digital and algorithmic forms of control. The voice of dissent is frequently neglected, suppressed, and erased. In such a political terrain, any counterrevolution in a spectacular form is difficult unless it culminates in absolute autocracy. Resistance thus manifests in dispersed ways, in the form of negation, refusal, and protest against inequality, discrimination, and the erosion of democracy and human rights. While resistance has been conceptualized through action, performance, and positionality, how it produces knowledge remains largely absent from its epistemology. Beyond opposition and contradiction, resistance generates discourses that unsettle the power structure of neoliberal governance. Against multilayered surveillance mechanisms of the securitized state, resistance becomes transmedial, often indirect, demonstrated through “counter-conducts.” My paper thus explores resistance not merely as a political act but as an epistemic intervention. It shows how resistance generates counter-knowledges against state hegemony, thereby forming counterpublics, a domain of counter-discourse, a network of solidarity beyond control and surveillance. I demonstrate this through the case of Bhima Koregaon detainees in India, also known as BK-16.
Following the Bhima Koregaon violence, sixteen human rights defenders, including professors, lawyers, journalists, and poets, have been imprisoned since 2018 under the UAPA. A few of them secured bail, while others remained imprisoned without trial, with one dying in the prison. Alongside sit-in protests, public meetings, and cultural performances, they write memoirs such as Stan Swamy, Varavara Rao, and Anand Teltumbde, prison diaries like “BK 16: Prison Diary,” publish newspaper articles, and interviews recording their experiences inside the prison. These sites of counter-discourse not only provide testimony of their brutal penal experiences but also produce an epistemology of resistance against state authoritarianism and legal arbitrariness. These collective tactics of resistance in the face of police, bureaucratic, and media control form what I call carceral counterpublics, aimed at producing knowledges of injustice in a democratic nation among common citizens, challenging India’s recent ultra-nationalist, and pro-security stance. These prison narratives act as the reversal of the gaze; the prisoner documents the prison, scrutinises the structure, and exposes the institutional bureaucracy. Letters, diaries, memoirs, poems, albeit dispersed forms of resistance, not only withstand normalisation and erasure but also disrupt the state’s monopoly over truth-production by preserving lived experiences.